The View Backward to American Popular Music of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Weaving the Threads Together

The nineteenth century was an especially important time in the merger of the music traditions of cultures as diverse those of Europe and Africa. The merger occurred under the unfortunate circumstances of slavery and was significantly abetted by the Evangelical movement. The musical developments of the twentieth century were nothing short of explosive and witnessed the emergence of a rich variety of musical styles and dialects within the parameters of a national style.

The developments of the nineteenth century included the incorporation of “call and answer” of the slave work song into the mainstream. African polyrhythmic drumming and drum dancing became the basis for the high level of syncopation found in all American popular music. The African slave and, later in the nineteenth century, the African American free man, adopted and adapted the simple harmonic progressions of the Protestant hymn into his Spiritual. In the process, he learned to apply harmony to other kinds of music and yet retain the melodic structures and scales and the polyrhythm of his culture. The major pentatonic scale from British folksong and the minor pentatonic scale from the sorrow song and early blues joined to become the melodic basis of American song and American improvisational instrumental playing. During this period of fusion, the lines defining the British folk song, the African American Spiritual, and the American folksong began to blur. The minor pentatonic scale became more important in Black singing after the Emancipation, once the former slave was finally free to please himself, not the master, in his singing. The minor key came to the fore in the Sorrow song, and soon became the basis of Blues. Both whites and blacks embraced the theoretical aspects of the new music created by this remarkable symbiosis, and a distinctly American music was born.

Turn-of-the-century America was still a country in which one region was separated from another by distance and culture. Regional influences and political events prompted the formation of local music styles. The Mississippi Delta spawned a rural Blues derived from the Sorrow Song Spiritual. The migration up the Mississippi River of former slaves in search of work and the relatively recent tradition of the marching band gave St. Louis its own voice, Ragtime. New Orleans, with its sharp stratification of society within its African community, created jazz, music at once as sophisticated as European art song and as raw as drum dancing. New immigrants brought their folksong and dance music, such as the “waltz” song, with them as they sought their dreams, and New York rapidly became the “melting-pot” model for the rest of the country. Northern stage performers misunderstood Southern culture and created minstrelsy, while immigrants thankful for the new life, such as George Cohen, wrote music that brimmed with patriotism for his new country. Hispanic immigrants brought the claves rhythm. White settlers, geographically isolated from the rest of the world sometimes for generations, inadvertently renewed older songs with new words and melodic tweaks, and composed new songs in a similar style. They sang this music and played it on the fiddle and the banjo, the latter an instrument that slaves fleeing the South gave as a gift. African American Bluesmen gave us the twelve-bar, the hymn gave us the four-line stanza and later grew into the thirty-two bar stanza-bridge form (AABA), and the Spiritual gave us stanza-refrain form.

Although the seeds of twentieth-century popular music had been sown in disparate regions in the previous century, early modern developments began to make the country culturally more uniform. It was the same process of communication, though at an earlier stage, that currently makes the entire world a group of diverse neighborhoods rather than separate universes isolated by distance and travel time. The greatest stride toward a curious homogeneity was the music publishing industry, and it was followed in short order by a new industry based on new inventions, recording and broadcasting. The impact of recording and broadcasting upon America’s musical culture was profound: it opened to everyone the gates to all styles and triggered large scale cross-pollination.

Sorting through the styles and the influences that formed American popular music can be a daunting task. There are several clear identifiers that can give clues to origin, at least in a general sense. One of the most fundamental music characteristic is metric organization. American popular music has conformed historically to one of three patterns, the two-step, the four-beat, and the waltz. The last, the waltz came into popular usage with the wave of European immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is found across most popular genres except Blues and Jazz.

The two-step traces its ancestry to rag time, the conflation of marching band music, some Spirituals and minstrel/parlor songs, the European piano miniature, and elements such syncopation drawn from African-American music. The two-step formed the basis of rag and of the subsequent animal dances (Fox trot, turkey trot, chicken glide, grizzly bear, and its progeny, the Charleston). Here is a miniature example of American musical evolution through combination. In 1914, dancers Irene and Vernon Castle, who specialized in Latin dances, used an arrangement by James Europe, the pioneer big-band leader, of W.C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues” as the musical basis to invent the fox trot. The dance caught on at all levels of society, and dancing to syncopated music became not only socially acceptable among upper-class whites, but even affected women’s fashions. Women’s clothing became looser in order to permit free movement! From the dance floor the two-step was absorbed into “Sweet,” and later into folk, and country. It remains a mainstay of folk and country music to this day.

By contrast, the four-beat organization of meter can be traced back to African drumming. It is found as early as some Spirituals, but really became established in rural Blues. It was carried from rural Blues into its cousin urban Blues, and also into Swing, modern jazz, rock ‘n; roll, and all the later subgroups of rock. The sounding of a bass note and its back-up in the drums on each of the four beats is absolutely critical to these styles because the statement of the four-beat pattern enhances and heightens the perception of the syncopation in the upper voices. Although a considerable jump ahead in time, hip hop and rap also derive from the same rhythmic source and may be regarded as the modern-day resurrection of African drum dancing.

Important variants on the four-beat pattern are immediately identifiable in specific Latin rhythms and include, rumba, tango, mambo, salsa, and tango. Scholars even sometimes question if the cakewalk of the late nineteenth century is directly African in origin, proposing that it might in fact be Latin. Although the rhythms are specific and standard, the actual realization on percussion instruments varies greatly. Layers of percussion instruments always and immediately categorizes as rumba or a rumba variant. The use of the bass or guitar, often without any accompanying percussion, to state the rhythm is always the stylistic earmark of tango and samba. It is important here to remember that the Caribbean islands were used in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the “seasoning” grounds for slaves new transported from Africa. All rhythmic or metric patterns reflect the melding in the islands of African culture with the different cultures of the slave masters. Hence the labels “Cuban,” “Jamaican,” “Brazilian,” and even the generic “Latin” describe African rhythms with different European accents.

The specific treatment of certain voices also offers clues to origin. The bass voice is the one most often articulated with a certain style. The alternating bass is the foundation of the two-step. The repeated four-beat bass note pattern is the underpinning of both rural and early urban Blues. The walking bass is the superstructure for modern jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. Later urban Blues incorporated “barrelhouse walks” or ostinati and these walks in turn were absorbed on a grand scale into Country as the standard alternative to the two-step (Patsy Cline, “I Fall to Pieces”; Vince Gill, “Take Your Memory With You”; Dixie Chick, “Tonight the Heartache’s on Me”) and into rock ‘n’ roll (any Chuck Berry song), where it often forms the critical backbone. The ostinato was also absorbed into Latin-influenced music (especially rumba, Elvis Presley, “Hound Dog”), Motown (“I Can’t Help Myself”), and Metal (“In-a-Gooda-da-Vida,” many songs by Led Zep, Ozzie Osbourne). Moreover, the ostinato and “rift” of Swing are not unrelated in conception. Rifts are also common in American popular music, and sometimes the rift and the ostinato blend together.

A hybrid of the four-beat and two-step patterns is found in the alternating bass of mambo and salsa. The rhythm is created by retaining the four-beat clave or rumba rhythm and holding the second note through to the end of the bar instead of sounding the third note of the pattern. To replicate the mambo-salsa rhythm yourself, sing the bass to “Hound Dog” without the third note. Here then is a swinging hybrid. Blues and jazz also introduced a variant of the four-beat. Here each of the four beats is further divided into three time units. It is counted then in four groups of three (1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2-3). This division, called “triplets,” gives Blues and Jazz its “swing.” Doo wop is a style that brought the triplet from the background to the foreground as a typical characteristic.

Another feature critical to tracing origin is found in the style of the singing. Black singers embellish, vary, and develop the melody with each stanza, often adding elaborate melismas and very difficult melodic leaps. The melody line tends to be active and intense, as in Blues, jazz, R&B, Soul, and even some commercial music (Whitney Houston). “Call and answer” structure is an African feature carried over from slave days. It can occur between the first and second phrase in a single voice part, between the singer and electric guitarist, or between a singer and a back-up vocal group as in music influenced first by the gang work song and later Gospel. Doo wop is the product of melding work song/Gospel singing traditions to later popular music, and any music in any style that incorporates group back-up singing takes that texture directly from Gospel.

A more formal and very different approach to singing is found in the music of the Carter family and Vernon Dalhart. Dalhart’s execution does not admit ornamentation. Instead he stays to the written notes but sings with a voice that is clear, open, and highly accurate. Whereas the Carters drew upon the white spiritual, Dalhart drew upon a more European style of singing, both historically (parlor songs) and by virtue of his training as a singer of operetta. His singing became the model; at a million copies sold, it is not difficult to understand why his music was commercially emulated. The unadorned style of singing informed country music for most of its evolution, spanning Gene Autry and the singing cowboys, Texas Swing, Hank Williams’ honky-tonk, and Patsy Cline’s slick Nashville sound. Only recently have country singers, especially females, begun to heavily ornament their melodies in imitation of earlier black styles. The clear delivery also informs folk music, the acoustic and conservative music that shared the country music wellspring, and it is found in most commercial “hit-parade” music into the 1960s. Since it is more understandable to middle-class audiences, this singing delivery has also been the mainstay until recently of American musicals. Finally, it is found in Sweet, though the evidence of Bing Crosby’s singing tells us “straight-ahead” singing was not always the case.

The choices of scale in formulating melody are also part of style. The minor pentatonic is, of course, the principal scale in the Sorrow song Spiritual and quite a large part of the Blues repertory. Many urban Blues pieces use the minor pentatonic scale exclusively, and the scale imbues the music with the “down and dirty” quality. The “blue notes” of the minor pentatonic scale are retained in the more sophisticated scales of jazz. These “blue notes” also add the bite, usually near the end of the stanza in Country and rock ‘n’ roll. Until the advent of the rock opera, the blue note rarely had a place, except for effect, in the mild, white songs of the American musical.

The instruments used to play the music identify the historical influence. The cornet and the banjo place the music in time and style as being part of early twentieth century jazz, just as the appearance in jazz bands of the trumpet and guitar date the music as later in the century. The presence of the pedal steel guitar tells the listener instantly that the music is country and that it was recorded after the late 1930s. The modern use of the banjo occurs only in country and especially bluegrass, another country cousin. The primacy of the guitar in Blues, rock ‘n’ roll, and later rock is self evident. A full orchestra or a large band that utilizes bowed strings and instruments that generally find greater use in classical music identifies the big band as well as the type of orchestra required by the musicals of the “Golden Age.” The saxophone identifies Swing, modern jazz, and Motown, just as the presence of brass instruments in Motown and Soul are vestiges of the Swing band.

Musical texture also offers insight regarding origin or at least in distinguishing style. Music that incorporates layers of percussion instruments bespeaks Caribbean, especially Cuban, influence. Not all Latin influenced music features percussive layering, however, and two critical exceptions are the Argentine tango and the Brazilian urban samba. At the other end of the spectrum, “open” textures indicate different influences. An open texture is one in which the music emphasizes the highest and lowest voice and minimizes the inside voices. All voices, especially the outside ones often create polyphony, that is, two or more simultaneous melodies. Pinpointing the precise beginning of the polarized texture, like pinpointing the beginnings of so many other elements of American music, is impossible. The wellspring of this texture is Blues. The texture is a practical necessity in the music of the rural Blues. The urban blues of Muddy Waters is not particularly polarized, but it is polyphonic, each member of the band playing his own melody and no member strumming chords.

The open texture is found, however, in the music of Muddy Waters’ contemporaries such as Tamp Red. The guitar solo is also found here, and the claim by some scholars that Louis Armstrong invented the solo in his “hot” recordings seems inaccurate in this light. More likely, the texture and the solo were coming into use as a general feature in several styles in the 1940s, and the styles cross-pollinated each other. Certainly, later generations of Bluesmen, especially those who were alumni of his bands such as Buddy Guy, opened up their textures and pushed the solo forward. English guitarists such as Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton emulated Guy and his colleagues, and brought it to commercial music as a standard feature of the second stage of rock.

Although slightly later than textural developments in Blues, Count Basie’s concept of “comping,” in conjunction with Armstrong’s disengagement of the lines polyphonic group improvisation and reformulation into consecutive rather than concurrent solos, changed the nature of jazz texture and laid the foundation for the advances of modern jazz. Here one must consider the practical aspects that every young improviser discovers immediately on his maiden soloing voyage: it takes an incredibly strong musical personality to play a melody that contains many dissonant tones against chords that sound on each beat. Comping reduces the appearances of the chords to occasional beats as well as permits melodic fragments to be created among the highest notes of he chords. Comping, then, leaves the texture open so that the soloist is supported only by the bass, a voice which sounds at least an octave lower and so sounds “out of the way.” Comping eliminates the competition and the dissonant clash of notes sounding in the same register, permitting the soloist to explore scales and melodies with far greater freedom. The ultimate freedom of exploration, of course, came with Coltrane, and his elimination of all other instruments.

Other styles have textures that fall somewhere along the continuum described above. Music from the earlier periods of musical theater and “sweet” show a careful orchestration that is akin to that of European classical music. Bluegrass features group improvisation similar to New Orleans style jazz but features more strummed chord fill rather than independent melody from each of the players. Here the bass part is simplified as the two-step alternating bass, relegating it to the background as a “given” that does not require great powers of attention to follow. Folk music played by small groups shares this texture, and folk musicians who accompany themselves are often likely to play guitar arpeggios (notes of the chord plucked in repeated sequences), creating a “busy” background but not a polyphonic one. Commercial music of many styles tends fill their backgrounds with sound but in such a way that the music is never truly polyphonic or that the ancillary music crowds out or buries the singer. As in the “Nashville Sound,” elements of texture are derived from other styles and used to make the texture as busy as possible without obscuring the “star.” Control of the texture is maintained by careful arrangement, and in this respect the music reflects the careful planning one expects in musical theater. The “busy-ness” of the texture almost seems to have three purposes: 1.) keep the listener pleasantly engaged, 2.) give the customer a product he perceives as worth his dollar, and 3.) avoid the danger, rawness, crudeness, negative class association, or even the intellectual challenge that historically can be inherent in music that features a more open texture. Despite commercial music producers’ and record companies’ best efforts to make money, art often still shines through.